Rhiow smiled. She said the word that released the air from solidity: upward and behind her, the strings faded back into the general fabric of things from which they had briefly been plucked, and the air dispersed with a sigh. Rhiow walked by the garbage bag toward the streetward wall and the gate in it, still smiling. She knew where this one was. Later, she thought. Rats were smart, but not smart enough to leave garbage alone. It was two days yet until collection. The rat would be back, and so would she.
But right now, she had business. Rhiow put her head out under the bottom of the iron door, looked around. The sidewalk was empty of pedestrians for half a block; most important, there were no houiff in sight. Not that Rhiow was in the slightest afraid of houiff, but they could be a nuisance if you ran into them without warning—the ridiculous barking and the notice they drew to you were both undesirable.
A quiet morning, thank Iau. She slipped under and out, onto the sidewalk, and trotted along at a good rate. There was no time to idle, and besides, one of the first lessons a city cat learns is that it’s always wise to look like you’re going somewhere definite, and like you know your surroundings. A cat that idles along staring at the scenery is asking for trouble, from houiff or worse.
She passed the dry cleaner’s, still closed so early, and the bookshop, and the coffee-and-sandwich shop—open and making extremely tantalizing smells of bacon: Rhiow muttered under her breath and kept going. Past the stores were five or six brownstones in a row, and as she passed the third one, a gravelly voice said, “Rhiow!”
She paused by the lowest step, looking up at the top of the graceful granite baluster. Yafh was sitting there with a bored look, scrubbing his big blunt face: not that scrubbing it ever made much difference to his looks. The spot was a perfect one for beginning the day’s bout of hauissh, the position-game that cats everywhere played with each other for territorial power, or pleasure, or both. In hauissh, early placement was everything. Now any cat who might appear on the street and try to settle down in the area that Yafh was temporarily claiming as “territory” would have to deal with Yafh first—by either confronting him head-on, moving completely out of sight, or taking a neutral stance… which would translate as appeasement or surrender, and lose the newcomer points.
Rhiow, since she was just passing through, was not playing. Business certainly gave her an excuse not to pause, but she rarely felt so antisocial. She went up the stairs, jumped onto the baluster, and paced down toward Yafh to breathe breaths with him. “Hunt’s luck, Yafh—”
His mouth a little open, Yafh made an appreciative “tasting” face at the scent of her cat food. “If I had been really hunting, I could have used some luck,” he said. “One of those little naked houiff, say … or even a pigeon. Even a squirrel. But there’s nothing round here except roaches and rats.”
Rhiow knew: she had smelled them on his breath, and she kept her own taste-face as polite as she could. “Don’t they feed you in there, Yafh? If it weren’t for you, your ehhif would have those things in their stairwells, if not their beds. You should leave them and go find someone who appreciates your talents.”
Yafh made a most self-deprecating silent laugh and tucked himself down into half-crouch again, folding his paws in. After a moment Rhiow joined in the laugh, without the irony. Of the many cats in these few square blocks, Yafh was the one Rhiow knew and was known by best, and some would have found that an odd choice of friends, for one with Rhiow’s advantages. Yafh was a big cat for one who had been untommed very young, but unless you took a close look at his hind end, you would never have suspected his ffeih status from the way his front end looked. Yafh would fight anything that moved, and had done so for years: he had enough scar tissue to make a new cat from, and was as ugly as a houff—broken-nosed, ragged-eared, one eye gone white-blind from some old injury. Where there were no scars, Yafh’s coat was white; but his fondness for dust-bathing and for hunting in the piled-up rubbish behind his ehhif’s building kept him a more or less constant dingy gray. His manner was generally as blunt and bluff as his looks, but he had few illusions and no pretensions, and his good humor hardly ever failed, whether he was using it on others or on himself.
“Listen,” Yafh said, “what’s food, in the long run? Once you’re full, you sleep, whether it’s caviar you were eating, or rat. These ehhif let me out on my own business, at least: that’s more than a lot of us hereabouts can say. And they may be careless about mealtimes, but they don’t send me off to have my claws pulled out, either, the way they did with poor Ailh down the road. Did you hear about that?”
“You’ll have to tell me later,” Rhiow said, and shook herself all over to hide the shudder. Such horror stories had long ago convinced her to leave her ehhif’s furniture strictly alone, no matter how tempted she might be to groom her claws on its lovely seductive textures. “Yafh, I hate to wash and run, but it’s business this morning.”
“They work you too hard,” he said, eyeing her sidewise. “As if the People were ever made to work in the first place! The whole thing’s some ehhif plot, that’s what it is.”
Rhiow laughed as she jumped down from the baluster. Others might retreat into unease at her job, or envy of it: Yafh simply saw Rhiow’s errantry as some kind of obscure scam perpetrated on her proper allotment of leisure time. It was one of the things she best liked about him. “ ’Luck, Yafh,” she said, starting down the sidewalk again. “See you later.”
“Hunt’s luck to you too,” he said, “you poor rioh.” It was a naughty punning nickname he had given her some time back—the Ailurin word for someone’s beast of burden.
Rhiow went on her way, past the empty doorsteps, smiling crookedly to herself. At the corner she paused, looking down the length of Third. The light Sunday morning traffic was making her life a little easier, anyway: there was no need to wait. She trotted across Third, dashed down along the wall of the apartment building on the comer there, and ducked under the gate of the driveway behind it, making for the maze of little narrow alleys and walls on the inside of the block between Third and Lexington.
This was probably the most boring part of Rhiow’s day: the commute down to the Terminal. She could have long-jumped it, of course. Considering her specialty, that kind of rapid transit was simple. But long-jumping took a lot of energy—too much to waste first thing in the morning, when she was just getting started, and when having enough energy to last out the day’s work could mean the difference between being successful or being a total failure. So instead, Rhiow routinely went the long way: across to Lexington as quickly as she could manage, and then downtown, mostly by connecting walls and rooftops. The route was circuitous and constantly changing. Construction work might remove a long section of useful wall-walk or suddenly top the wall with sharp pieces of glass; streets might become easier to use because they were being dug up, or alternately because digging had stopped; scaffolding might provide new temporary routes; demolition work might mean a half-block’s worth of barriers had suddenly, if temporarily, disappeared—at least, until construction work began. Typically, though, Rhiow would have at least a few weeks on any one route—long enough for it to become second nature, and for her to run it in about three-quarters of an hour, without having to think much about her path until she got down near Grand Central and met up with the others.